Word: cythera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Derain's The Turning Road, L'Estaque, 1906. Luxe is a clumsily tender Arcadi an idyl, the Isle of Cythera transferred to an as yet unpopular St.-Tropez, spatted with dots of neo-impressionist light. The painting is drenched in idealized wistfulness, even to the title, taken from Baudelaire's L 'Invitation au voyage: "There, all is order and beauty/Luxury, calm and sensuous pleasure." No effort can restore its lost shock value, and this, in a different way, is true of the Derain as well. Today we luxuriate in its weighty design and audacious color...
Pagan Love. Rubens added some thing to the meaning of every subject he touched, but perhaps the deepest transformation of a theme that he set off was the imagery of the terrestrial paradise, which he changed into a thoroughly erotic Eden: the island of Cythera, sacred to Aphrodite. It was from this delectable abode of profane love that the 18th century painters of the féte champétre drew their inspiration. Rubens' outdoor courts of pagan love became Watteau's exquisite assemblies of lovers and Pierrots, at dusk, beside the Mozartian stone statue. This vision...
...awareness of their patrician Doppelgängers. The Isle of Jazz in Music Land (1946) is a brassy plebeian version of an almost archetypal image that in fine art reveals itself in Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera: an island as kingdom of mood...